As business becomes more competitive, the success of an organization increasingly depends on how quickly, smoothly, and efficiently people within that organization work together. The key to a successful organization is how well that organization manages and distributes information. Networking is an important part of teamwork because it enables fast and efficient information exchange. Organizations must also keep track of the information and manage its distribution. Electronic messaging systems provide these capabilities.
Electronic messaging has become critically important to enterprise computing. In fact, many organizations expect their electronic messaging systems to take on the role of a central communications backbone, used not only for electronic-mail (e-mail or email) messages, but to integrate all types of information. Electronic messaging provides a way for users in organizations to retrieve information from a variety of sources, to exchange information automatically, and to store, filter, and organize the information locally or across a network.
Today, powerful enterprise-wide workgroup applications that manage group scheduling, forms routing, order processing, and project management are built on electronic messaging systems. Hundreds of different messaging systems are offered by different vendors, (including Microsoft® Exchange, IBM® Lotus Notes®, IBM® Domino®, Novell® Groupwise®, SAP® R/3® Enterprise Software, Oracle® Interoffice™, Oracle® Collaboration Suite (OCS) and others) and a wide range of applications have been built to use them. These applications need to be able to access datastores created and maintained by the messaging systems.